When You Are Engulfed in Flames Read Online Free PDF Page A

over her slip, and she took up her position on the bed, surrounded by the baby dolls she referred to as “doll babies.” Gretchen was given the first shift, and the rest of us were sent outside to pull weeds in the blistering sun.
    “Thank God,” I said to Lisa. “I was worried for a minute there that we’d have to feel sorry for her.”
    As children we suspected that Mrs. Peacock was crazy, a catchall term we used for anyone who did not recognize our charms. As adults, though, we narrow it down and wonder if she wasn’t clinically depressed. The drastic mood swings, the hours of sleep, a gloom so heavy she was unable to get dressed or wash herself — thus the slip, thus the hair that grew greasier and greasier as the week progressed and left a permanent stain on our parents’ gold bedspread.
    “I wonder if she’d been institutionalized,” Lisa will say. “Maybe she had shock treatments, which is what they did back then, the poor thing.”
    We’d like to have been that compassionate as children, but we already had our list, and it was unthinkable to disregard it on account of a lousy matchbox. Our parents returned from their vacation, and before they even stepped out of the car we were upon them, a mob, all of us talking at the same time. “She made us go to her shack and pick up turds.” “She sent us to bed one night without supper.” “She said the master bathroom was ugly, and that you were stupid to have air-conditioning.”
    “All right,” our mother said. “Jesus, calm down.”
    “She made us scratch her back until our arms almost fell off.” “She cooked sloppy joe every night, and when we ran out of buns she told us to eat it on crackers.”
    We were still at it when Mrs. Peacock stepped from the breakfast nook and out into the carport. She was dressed, for once, and even had shoes on, but it was too late to play normal. In the presence of my mother, who was tanned and pretty, she looked all the more unhealthy, sinister almost, her mouth twisted into a freaky smile.
    “She spent the whole week in bed and didn’t do laundry until last night.”
    I guess I expected a violent showdown. How else to explain my disappointment when, instead of slapping Mrs. Peacock across the face, my mother looked her in the eye, and said, “Oh, come on. I don’t believe that for a minute.” It was the phrase she used when she believed every word of it but was too tired to care.
    “But she
abducted
us.”
    “Well, good for her.” Our mother led Mrs. Peacock into the house and left my sisters and me standing in the carport. “Aren’t they just horrible?” she said. “Honest to God, I don’t know how you put up with them for an entire week.”
    “You don’t know how
she
put up with
us?
”
    Slam!
went the door, right in our faces, and then our mom sat her guest down in the breakfast nook and offered her a drink.
    Framed through the window, they looked like figures on a stage, two characters who seem like opposites and then discover they have a lot in common: a similarly hard upbringing, a fondness for the jugged Burgundies of California, and a mutual disregard for the rowdy matinee audience, pitching their catcalls from beyond the parted curtain.
    This Old House
    When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining room set my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.
    The buffet, like the table, was an exercise in elegant simplicity. The set was made of teak and had been